The Turk of Anatolia

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XLIX, Issue 39, 5 October 1922, Page 21

The Turk of Anatolia

(By Boy Elston, in the Review, of Reviews.) Tall, and proportionately broad ; Caucasian in feature despite his Mongolian ancestry, and strong dignified features at that; sober, vigorous, moral because ho loves morality, and generous because meanness is foreign to his nature ; nious, with a piety that sometimes bursts to passionate fanaticism; lazv, because, of his fatalistic temperament and his too selfish reliance in Allah’s generosity; thus the Anatolian Turk of whose character the Western world is so pitifully ignorant. Ho is not the idealised creature with whom Pierre Loti has made us familiar, nor the barbarous savage of pro-Armenian or pro-Greek imagination; indeed, he is really a very normal person. True, perhaps, his primitive vice is nearer to the surface than is the case with us; so also are his primitive virtues. His hatreds are rarely premeditated, and are due, as a rule, to accidental excitements. One cannot, of course, deny his long-standing hostility toward certain other races of Asia Minor, as, for example, the Armenians; and here, in extenuation, it is as well to point out one, at least, of the cogent reasons for that hostility. For many years a large Percentage of the Armenians has practised throughout Anatolia a sinster usury similar to that which provided the mediaeval Jew with his unenviable reputation; and his victims, generally Turkish farmers, are often goaded to deeds they would scarcely contemplate under ordinary circumstances. This affairs, aided bv the distrust existing universally between peasantry and financial class, has, after generations, created a feeling of hostility that seems likely to endure. There is a similar bitterness between Greek and Turk, though I fanev the Ottoman dislike of the Greek is not a very deep dislike by one administration this bitterness is fed and fanned for purely political reasons; bv another, it is allayed for purely commercial reasons, till at best tho feeling has become one simplv of toleration. It is certain, however, that centuries of ill-tempered rivalry—due, in no little measure, to the Turkish envy of Greek Prosperityhave resulted in a mutual distrust that sometimes ends in bloodshed; and very often it is merely opportunity that decides which of the two is the more lawless! At any rate, that is the opinion forced on unbiassed minds hero in Anatolia. For, after all, there is not between the Turk and other races of Asia Minor that difference which an inexperienced visitor is justified in expecting. See them in the fields, tilling, reaping, threshing as their forefathers did when the world was comparatively young; see them in their crude adobe dwellings; hear them talk of politics, crops and brigands; listen to their wild strange music that is scarcely music at all; study their morals and their many superstitions; Greek, Armenian, Turk, observe them all, and yon will be surprised at the absence of contrasts. True enough, the Christian raots of Asia. Minor are superior, economically, to their Turkish neighbors. Their minds are more trained in commercial subtleties, and their greater knowledge of, and desire for, the comforts attendant on successes, provide them with an ambition the Turkish peasant lacks; also, to some extent, it robs them of many of the simple virtues possessed bv the Ottoman peasants. However, so far as. an “unspeakable” nature is concerned, ‘the Turk is really no worse than Greek or Armenian; and, of course, no better. Massacre and, cruelty have occurred, and do occur to horrify the world from time to time; and, of course, I do not ‘desire to condone these things. I wish only to insist that the true Anatolian Turk —and here I do not include the Kurds, Circassians, and Black Sea Lazis, who are not true Ottomans at all — no love for needless cruelty, though, if, according to his fm or ale. which obviously and naturally differ from ours, he considers the occasion merits it. and there is no other way of securing what, to him, is a legitimate end, he does not shrink from deeds that, despite our European War, cause us to turn shocked eyes to heaven.

If we would seek to find the cause of massacre and* outrage in Asia Minor Ave must look to the administrative fortune-seekers of Stamboul. A great pity it is that people have so often judged the Turks by a handfulcity-full if you will— corrupt administrators. A very great difference exists between these Turks of Stamboul and those of Anatoliathe difference between an artificial and a natural environment; and one is sometimes forced to the conclusion that the greatest disaster in Turkish history was the capture of Constantinople, and the retention by its captors of a Byzantine legacy of intrigue and luxury, a legacy clung to by successive Sultans and bureaucracies till only complete revolution now can cleanse tht Porte of accumulated vice. Effete, corrupt, “unspeakable” even, might - fit the state of the Ottoman Court; it certainly cannot be said of the Anatolian Turk, in whom reposes to this day much of that same vigor and virility that made an empire of a tribe, and extended that empire’s will from Baghdad to Cairo, from Buda Pesth to the Black Sea. At present that vigor and virility would seem to be slumbering and for this there are two causes over and above the corrupt state of the governing classed; one of these causes is tine lack of a brilliant and trustworthy leader whom the people could regard as an instrument of Allah; the other, the careless, liberal ideas on religion and politics that have filtered from Europe to Asia. . The first of these reasons is easily understood: the Ottoman of Anatolia requires a contemporary hero whoso actions and intentions are not subtle, but obvoius'; ho cannot, himself, see into the minute details of modern diplomacy; he cannot understand the trend of his country’s fortunes when not one man but a score seems to he directing them; and so he goes on in the dark, fulfilling, as well as he may, the simple teachings of the Koran. What comes or goes he accepts with a shrug of the shoulders and a pious ejaculation, and the time seems to him very distant when events had any meaning worth his bothering about. Without some 1 strong mind to rouse him from his lethargy, and instil in him the fire of ambition, he will continue in the careless, slothful existence that may at length destroy his stamina. The second reason is not, 1 perhaps, so easy for a Western mind to appreciate; hut it is a dangerous reason none the less. The subtle, almost invisible, penetration of Western ideas into Turkey greatly affects the character of tho peasants, and affects it in a wav that spells disaster. Already the Islamic religion in Turkey is losing that A'morons militancy that once distinguished it; much of that militancy, I agree, could have been modified without harm, but. in, so far as liberal ideas are destroying the discipline and strength of the Church, Turkey as a nation is being morallv weakened, is losing one of its greatest• incentives; and this is due. in certain measure, to that Western influence which leads men to think a great deal more of freedom than of duty, of self than of nation. When I speak of Western ideas, I do not- mean those progressive ideas of commerce and —Turkey has room for some of those —hut social ideas, the “highfalutin” doctrines which seem to destroy the need for individual thought, destroy that thought itself ,and feed the mind with dreamy vaporous utopias; even far afield in Anatolia one occasionally hears repeated those moral and social platitudes with which the Western world in recent vears has become so painfully familiar; and absurd enough thev sound from tho lips of these strong-looking dignified Turks, whose very nature breathes robust conservatism. Despite this, one must admit that, in certain social directions', the Turk could profit by the careful acceptance of one or two Western institution; such, for example, as the traditional family life of Europe; such life with these peasants has, I fear, degenerated. They have physical desires, they require cheap labor for the fields, and tho forests, they recognise the national necessity for propagation ; indeed, for -a purely political reason, this necessity is drilled constantly into their minds by the authorities ; and that is all their family or home life consists of: in no sense is there anything beautiful or inspiring about it, save when a Turkish mother rocks her babe to sleep as SAvectlv as any mother in the world. , All this has been said in an endeavor to show that the Turk of Anatolia is neither “unspeakable” nor greatly to he admired, Centuries of maladministration, the lack of great national fibres, 'the growing carelessness of thought ; -all these things have done their best to ■ reduce the Turk to impotency. Notwithstanding this, the spirit of his forefathers smoulders still in the blood of the Anatolian peasant: whether at length it will die out or blaze again to strength and greatness, is a matter purely for con iecture. Those who have dwelt in Anatolia are optimistic.